What Remains for You to Do

In a word: plenty. Let me elaborate.

One: own your religion, don’t borrow it. If you are to make it work for yourselves, and especially if you wish to make an impact on the larger Church, you have to read, think, and write deeply for the rest of your lives. Google will not get you there, and neither will the blogs.

Second, pay your dues, and stay in those pews. The Church is as much yours as it was Edwin Woolley’s.

Third, be political. The political intrigue for which the Vatican is famous meets its match in the Mormon church. If you really wish to improve things for the Church, as well as for yourself, consider that how you appear and how you act can easily block out what you are trying to accomplish. Take seriously the saying of Jesus: “Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.” [Matthew 10:16]

Next, Christ-centered boredom—which is not always Christ centered in this Church—is killing the vitality of the Church and driving untold thousands away, many of them youth who represent our best hope for the future. Reform of curriculum and retooling of worship services should be in the forefront of your minds.

Next, many of the most important doctrinal and historical issues within the Church are unfinished business. Choose one of the most important ones, research it deeply, and then speak and write of it in such an interesting way that it becomes integrated into Mormon thought and practice. And it is possible.

Next, individualize your religion, and then be an example to others who need and individualized approach outside the mainstream.

Next, inject your own flavor into your church experience, and show others how to do the same. Until the Church truly reflects all of its constituencies, and treats them fairly and wholly—and these include women, gays, people of color, people with disabilities, and foreign cultures of all types—it will be incomplete.

Next, extend the reach of Mormonism by integrating yourselves into the larger world. Far too many Mormons pay attention to part of Jesus’s directive—that of being “not of the world”—but they ignore totally his demand that they be “in the world.” [John 15:19] Don’t be afraid to join with others whose faiths are different, and even with other different religious traditions. You will find that you give up nothing by joining with others, and indeed, you sharpen your own identity in the process. If we preach Mormonism by action instead of words, those who see those good works and want to be part of them are likely to join and stay, as opposed to the 9 out of 10 converts who currently join only to leave.*

And finally, be patient and try not to complain too loudly. Most of the worthwhile things that happen do not happen quickly. The fruit that grows from seeds that you sow now may not be picked until your children and grandchildren come along.

Spencer Kimball kept a small plaque on his desk which simply read, “Do it.” One bit of Mormon humor that made the rounds during the ’70s was, “What do you get when you cross Spencer Kimball and Golden Kimball? ‘Do it, dammit.'”

*In a Q&A session immediately after the conference (56:51), Greg Prince explains his the “triangulation” he used to calculate this number. He explains, “We talked about this a little earlier in the back room. It is an accelerating process, and the accelerator is pushed in the wrong direction. A stake, by definition, is approximately 2,500 warm bodies. They don’t have to be active in the Church. There have to be enough of them active that they can adequately staff the ward and stake apparatus, ok? So every increase of 2,500—if you were at least hanging on to them so that you knew where they were and they acknowledged that they were LDS even if they weren’t showing up—that should give you one stake. In the 1990s, you had to have twice that number to get one stake. In the most recent decade, you have had to have four times that number to get one stake. And those numbers you can pull directly out of the Church Almanac. But they don’t know that; if they knew it, they probably wouldn’t publish them. But those are hard numbers to hide from, because all you need to do is take the total membership number and the delta of stakes since the previous year, and you’ve got it. … If you were identifying all of your converts so that you knew where they were, and they at least identified that they were LDS, you would get one out of every 2,500. Now you’re getting one out of every 10,000. So that tells you right off the bat that three-fourths of what you call ‘increase’ is gone—you can’t even find them—and then of the remaining one-fourth, half of that will be inactive. (Sorry, ‘less active’.) And when you consider that that delta in total membership includes baptism of children of record, who are more likely to stay, then it’s an easy triangulation to say we’re probably keeping one out of every ten converts as an active church member. That’s not a very good track record. I don’t know who would really be confronted with those numbers and claim victory.”